Susanne Dansey’s Blog

Many of us understand the phrase ‘prevention is better than cure’ and indeed this has never been truer than in the case of protecting your IT and the information stored within it.

A few months ago, I was lucky enough to present to the Women in Business Conference on the subject of what IT can do for their businesses. In a room of 400 ladies, a huge proportion of them put their hands up in response to my question of ‘how many of you have suffered significant downtime because of your IT’. From the general replies back from them, we established that up to three days were spent trying to recover information and reconnect with clients.

I did a quick calculation whilst on stage…

For a one person company who works from 9am-5.30pm (as if!) that works out to be 7.5 hours (you can have a lunch break),

Let’s say that this person charges £50 ($99)/hour for their time,

That’s a total of £375 ($742) per day

That’s a total of £1,125 ($2,226) for the three days!

The BCC and Microsoft recently commissioned a survey which found that IT security failures cost two-thirds of businesses an estimated £1,259 ($2,490) per annum.

Whatever the cost, it’s an expense that you will have to find the money to cover.

Wouldn’t it be easier to put even the smallest amount of resilience in place to prevent you having to work an additional three days to cover the cost of a simple mistake? Especially when an external USB hard drive costs around £60 ($119) for a 320GB disc - it’s not rocket science folks!

Now I don’t enjoy saying ‘I told you so’ to anyone, far from it. I rather enjoy hearing comments from those who I’ve ’scared’ into securing their IT and intellectual property and have done something about it.

IT isn’t particularly exciting to those outside of our industry at the best of times, so talking about backing up, testing backups, disaster recovery, is about as interesting as talking about working out what is the best mortgage arrangement or savings account to go with; they’re all important but it’s not something we all enjoy dealing with.

So here’s a thought, when thinking about adopting new technology into any business think of it not just as a number at the bottom of the quote. You need to think about the ’soft’ costs involved such as how much time and energy you saved by leaving it to the experts, or how much stress and costs you avoided by being sensible and protecting your data and IT.

Once you find someone who you can rely on and feel comfortable in asking a ’silly’ or ‘this will only take five minutes… promise!’ type question then they are probably someone who, whilst you would love to hire them, you just can’t afford to do so. So what do you do? Well, you have to realise that their expertise doesn’t come from simply doing an online search (believe me, some people do this and think they know everything!) but from years of experience and lots of sweat and tears.

So let’s get back to disaster recovery, or rather let’s take the nasty word ‘disaster’ away and call it Business Protection (or something similar) so it sounds less like you’re going to be told off for something you didn’t know about. Talking to those who are capable of understanding your business both from a business and a technical point of view will be key to ensuring you have the right procedures in place.

So if you haven’t got some form of AV program monitoring your email, then get some. There are plenty of free products available as well as ones that you pay for such as Symantec, McAfee, Trend, or Computer Associates (CA).

• Then make sure you have some spyware protection in place such as Spybot’s Search & Destroy, Windows Defender (comes bundled with Vista), or Spyware Doctor (for example).
• Make sure you have your PC(s) scheduled for regular backups, you can do this by going START> ALL PROGRAMS> ACCESSORIES> SYSTEM TOOLS> BACKUP and go from there. If you have Vista, type in ‘Backup’ within the search bar and you’ll find it.
• Buy yourself some form of external backup be it in ‘offline’ format or via something such as a USB hard drive - remember ‘cheap’ isn’t always great so make sure you buy a reputable brand JUST IN CASE that fails on you. Backup using this method and make sure this data is safely secured… JUST IN CASE!
• Test your backed up data and make sure you can retrieve it. Once you’ve done this, make a note of how long it took you to achieve this; you’ll need to include this in your IT Continuity plan so that in the case of an emergency, your IT recovery won’t be that unknown quantity. Believe me, you may not think your IT is that important, but in the event of a ‘disaster’ you will regret not putting it up there as a priority.

Susan also made reference to Disaster Recovery planning which you may also want to read up on. It links to a number of documents which help advise you on how to plan and prepare in the event of a loss of data or IT connectivity.

Most IT errors, big or small, are caused by human error. We’ve all heard about the employee who was put in charge of changing the tapes in the server each night and then discovering after two years (yes that’s right folks) that there was, and never had been, any data on it. Whilst the client thought they were doing the right thing, they didn’t understand the technology enough to realise that someone had to instruct the server to write the data to the tape.

Don’t let this be you. Talk to your IT Partner (check out the Microsoft Small Business Specialists as they know a thing or two!) and talk about putting an IT User Policy Document together so that your staff know what to do (and what not to do) and don’t just rely on one person.

If you are reading this and think ‘yes, everyone knows this stuff’, believe me many don’t, and those that do are usually already under your ‘wing’. It’s still wise to assume most people don’t because overlooking what we may think is obvious may not be to someone who has a different day job to us!

Remember: Prevention is always better than cure!